Recommend that your staff start personal blogs on their personal interests, and learn first hand what it feels like, including managing comments, wanting promotion, etc.

Map out an integrated project that incorporates a blog, use of commercial social networks, and a face-to-face event to build leads and drive awareness of a product.

Start a community group on Facebook or Ning or MySpace or LinkedIn around the space where your customer does business. Example: what Jeremiah Owyang did for Hitachi Data Systems.

Experiment with the value of live video like uStream.tv and Mogulus, or Qik on a cell phone.

Attend a conference dealing with social media like New Media Expo, BlogWorld Expo, New Marketing Summit (disclosure: I run this one with CrossTech), and dozens and dozens more. (Email me for a calendar).

Collect case studies of social media success. Tag them “socialmediacasestudy” in del.icio.us.Interview current social media practitioners. Look for bridges between your methods and theirs.

Explore distribution. Can you reach more potential buyers/users/customers on social networks.

Don’t forget early social sites like Yahoogroups and Craigslist. They still work remarkably well.

Search Summize.com for as much data as you can find in Twitter on your product, your competitors, your space.

Learn what other free tools might work for community building, like MyBlogLog.

Ensure you offer the basics on your site, like an email alternative to an RSS subscription. In fact, the more ways you can spread and distribute your content, the better.

Investigate whether your product sells better by recommendation versus education, and use either wikis and widgets to help recommend, or videos and podcasts for education.

Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.

Make Compete.com your next stop for understanding a site’s traffic. Then, mash it against competitors’ sites.

Learn how not to ask for 40 pieces of demographic data when giving something away for free. Instead, collect little bits over time. Gently.

Remember that the people on social networks are all people, have likely been there a while, might know each other, and know that you’re new. Tread gently into new territories. Don’t NOT go. Just go gently.

Help customers and prospects connect with you simply on your various networks. Consider a Lijit Wijit or other aggregator widget.

Voting mechanisms like those used on Digg.com show your customers you care about which information is useful to them.

Track your inbound links and when they come from blogs, be sure to comment on a few posts and build a relationship with the blogger.

Find a bunch of bloggers and podcasters whose work you admire, and ask them for opinions on your social media projects. See if you can give them a free sneak peek at something, or some other “you’re special” reward for their time and effort (if it’s material, ask them to disclose it).

Learn all you can about how NOT to pitch bloggers. Excellent resource: Susan Getgood.

Try out shooting video interviews and video press releases and other bits of video to build more personable relationships. Don’t throw out text, but try adding video.

Women are adding lots of value to social media. Get to know the ones making a difference. (And check out BlogHer as an event to explore).

Experiment with different lengths and forms of video. Is entertaining and funny but brief better than longer but more informative? Don’t stop with one attempt. And try more than one hosting platform to test out features.

Work with practitioners and media makers to see how they can use their skills to solve your problems. Don’t be afraid to set up pilot programs, instead of diving in head first.

People power social media. Learn to believe in the value of people. Sounds hippie, but it’s the key.

Spread good ideas far. Reblog them. Bookmark them. Vote them up at social sites. Be a good citizen.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Be ready to apologize. Admit when you’ve made a mistake.

Re-examine who in the organization might benefit from your social media efforts. Help equip them to learn from your project.

Use the same tools you’re trying out externally for internal uses, if that makes sense, and learn about how this technology empowers your business collaboration, too.

Thanks to Chris Brogan for the list...

Many of the above suggestions are suitable for Turkish Market as well ;) Try to use at least some of them and monitor the progress. As Chris said, do not fabricate and commercialize too much. This is the key of online marketing... I believe ;)

I have created a blog in Blogger named Dijital Pazarlama (Digital Marketing in Turkish) almost 1,5 year ago and wanted to see what will happen while this issue building it's path (in Turkey), Digital marketing or Online Marketing notions getting our lives. No doubt, a blog should be updated regularly, deliver different content and/or information to it's visitors every time they click. Frankly, during the same period I had to spend most of my time for our company, iGOA, which is a new generation interactive agency.

Today, as far as I know from the site statistics, number of visitors to this blog is constantly increasing and when you Google "Dijital Pazarlama" it comes as the first link. We can extract two simple result out of this;1- Interest on Dijital Pazarlama and/or Online Marketing has increased (in Turkey) and it is increasing day by day2- Still there are not enough content or even if exist, they are not gathered together

As everybody ask and search, what is this “Digital Marketing”?

I have already started to prepare my new article about this. The ones who is interested or want to contribute can reach me through this blog, share their ideas and suggestions. See you soon...